العادي

So since I've been able to update there are some things that have been requested that I address:

Firstly, Vernell's question about fashion in Damascus. Everyone here is a hell of a lot cooler than me, and I'm actually trying to reach the standard of cool 'round these parts. I bought two t-shirts and two very nice long-sleeved collared shirts that actually fit me, which I'm still having trouble believing. It was much easier to find nice clothes here than in the US, at least in Columbus. If I had to guess, I would say about 1/3 of all the ladies are covered in some way, and maybe 1/3 of that 1/3 have the black full-cover business going on, but even most of the covered ones are wearing nice clothes and jeans with their headscarves, and 2/3 of women have their hair all jazzed up and wear dresses, jeans, nice shirts, t-shirts, the usual. So some people are wearing traditional dress, but most look a hell of a lot more stylish than we do (or at least I do). The dudes all got their hair slicked back and wearing tight t-shirts with Dolce and Gabbana or whatever fashion companies I don't know about, or dress shirts, and tight jeans. Old people wear dressier clothes, and older people still wear traditional robes and kuffiyeh scarves, but they're not much around. Vernell, I will bring you back a fashion magazine, but most of them are just like ours, so they're not actually real people. I'll try to find one with fashion modeled by Syrians on the street or something like that. I saw one magazine that was sort of a fashion magazine but just consisted of nicely dressed people they found at dinners and exhibitions and stuff, with their names underneath them. That had a lot of local Syrian fashion in it, so I'll try to find it again.

As for Joe's comment:

Alex is doing really well. He's taking classes and meeting with colleagues' of his mother, and meeting a lot of students at the university it seems. He loves Syria as much as I do and is seriously considering taking a quarter off of school at OSU to stay here longer. I for one am not taking university classes here, but getting a tutor, so any interaction I have consists of going outside and meeting roommates' friends. My two first promising Syrian friends I met last night, who are rad as hell. We listened to the Deftones and talked about the majesty of Mike Patton. They were sort of depressed when I told them I only know about five people who appreciate Mike Patton as much as I do, not to mention how psyched I was to find two Syrians who do. It is good to see that Caglar finally made it back to Turkey without getting anything else broken or sprained, and I'm still giving heavy thought to whether I want to go to Lebanon or Turkey, seeing as how my visa is only good for one more entry into the country. There's Caglar in Turkey, or Beirut in Lebanon, which is the city that people keep telling us to go to if we want to leave Syria to visit a different country. Maybe I will eventually flip a five-lira coin to decide.

The internet cafes here are actually pretty great. The one I'm in now has about twenty computers and a couple spots for laptops, though the connection is only 24 Mbps. I thought it was higher last time I checked, but usually the place is pretty packed and right now I'm here in the very early afternoon when all you western hemispherites are asleep, and there are only three people here, so not much of a connection is needed. Maybe they turn up the juice when more people are here? Is that even possible? But yeah, most people come here to chat/talk/email with relatives in the US. They have microphones here at every computer for just that kind of thing, so it really picks up in the late afternoon and evening when relatives aren't asleep. The occasional Syrian comes in to play Counter Strike, but it's pretty much all foreign students. The first time I came I spoke Arabic to the guy at the counter and he gave me kind of a weird look, and spoke perfect English back at me, so I've just given up on using Arabic here. The fee for using the internet starts at 15 Syrian pounds and goes up slowly, so when I was here last time I spent about 45 minutes online and paid 60 pounds, which is a little over a dollar, so it's hella cheap here, even compared to the prices of everything else. I can be on the internet for half an hour for the price of a cup of tea, which is a dollar. I thought that should be cheaper. People who have been here for more than a few years say everything went up significantly in price since about a year and a half ago, which sucks. But it's still not bad at all to get a meal, and smoking a hookah is always 100 pounds, which is two bucks. And they're very good and use natural wooden coal (فحم خشب تبيعي) as the boxes say.

Something else you all might be interested to know: The television here is about 1/3 American shows and movie channels, which include Powerpuff Girls and Oprah, and old-school cartoons like Tom and Jerry and old Hannah-Barbera. All of the other channels are from all around the Arab world, including Egypt, the Emirates, Iraq, etc. Most of these channels are for sexy music videos (seriously, really sexy), television shows, and Arab movies (new and old). A few of them have talk shows and religious shows where an old guy in traditional garb talks about the Qur'an. One of them featured an albino Arab kid singing/reciting the Qur'an, which was sort of freaky. Maybe he is considered blessed?

Also, in very recent news, I was given a laqab, or a nickname, by my Syrian friends. I have no idea how these work, but they considered Abu Al-3ayn (Father of the Eye) because of my tattoo, and random other Arabic names, but discarded them all eventually until they settled on Tameem. These Arabic names are a mystery to anyone who doesn't speak Arabic. They would suggest seemingly random names and then say something like, "Ehhh... But his hair's not dark," or, "Yeah, that would be good, but he's not very tall." When I asked them what the names "mean" they tried to think about it and got really confused and said they couldn't really explain it, but that this one didn't work because my hair wasn't dark enough. So these names just have like... ideas associated with them, and when they give each other a nickname, it's representative of how they look and their personalities, but it doesn't necessarily describe them. It's just same hazy idea of what the name should represent. It's sweet. But when they came to Tameem, they were positive. There were no doubts that I'm a Tameem. I'm not sure what it signifies other than me, but I asked one of them to explain it and he said, "Tameem, tamaam," but he was just joking (tamaam means perfect/exact). So I'm trying to upload pictures again, but I just keep getting errors and network disconnections. Sorry. I'll try again at Alex's mom's colleague's workplace, where he said we can use the internet for free. Also an aside, this string of names leading to us getting free internet is an example of us having Vitamin Waaw (Wow), which is more or less the letter W in Arabic. It stands for wust.a in Arabic, which means a connection that gets you something (like a job or free internet). Apparently lots of people are successful here only because of a steady dose of Vitamin Wow (or veetameen wow, as pronounced in Damascus). Fortunately, we have some.

How is Sarah doing? Do we know? Apparently her internet sucks and she can barely read this blog because the computers are so bad. I'll try to make the text bigger but everything is in Arabic and they use weird words for computers.

Also, last night my friend Nebras (like Nebraska without the ka, as he explains it) and I were waiting for a delivery from what is basically Cluck U in the middle of Damascus (Syrians appreciate the importance of drunk food), and I told him about how Syrians keep asking me for directions. Five seconds later, count them, literally 1 2 3 4 5 seconds later, some old dude in a robe and his ninja (everything covered in black but the eyes) come right up to me, don't even look at him, and ask me where the Souq Hamidiyya is. I point east and tell them "Hayk" ("thattaway") and they leave. Nebras now knows that I do not lie.